


make friends with strange cats

by youareiron_andyouarestrong



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Animal Traits, F/M, beasts of the wild, but not werecreatures, everyone has animals characteristics, i don't know just roll with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2015-12-09
Packaged: 2018-05-05 19:43:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5387951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youareiron_andyouarestrong/pseuds/youareiron_andyouarestrong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one knows what kind of half beast Max is and he isn't inclined to tell. Apart from the fact he does seem to <em>purr</em> every so often. Usually only around Furiosa, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	make friends with strange cats

_**“You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.”–proverb from the World Before, as noted by the History Woman, Miss Giddy.** _

* * *

 Max will never, ever tell anyone what beast part he possesses–she thinks it might be a cat some days, a lurking, prowling leopard maybe, other days she thinks it might be a wolf, the lone hunter and wanderer out of all the old stories from the World Before. _Or maybe,_ Toast suggests when she’s in the mood to be funny, her merlin’s talons sliding in and out from under her nails lazily,  _he’s part_   _lapdog,_ to the general amusement and exasperation of her sisters.  _Not him,_ says Dag, crow feather patterns shifting under her skin,  _no, not him. Dog, yes loyal and steadfast,_ an affectionately sarcastic twist to her words. 

 _A feral one maybe,_  says Capable, shaking her head, the shrike’s feathers that always lingered in her hair fluttering. Joe liked to choose bird-women as his wives, liked the idea of them singing in their gilded vault, after the day Furiosa revealed the claws of a lioness under her nails, when she raked them across the throats of her enemies and Joe named her Imperator. 

(He choose poorly, for Angharad had the strength and fury of a caged golden eagle, with all it’s pride and defiance.) 

But Max–the Fool, he won’t say. Not a few months in the blood cages got it out of him, and three days of running across the desert in a blaze of fire and blood didn’t either. Not that she tried to find out. He’s entitled to some privacy, Furiosa thinks, though it’s a safe bet no one on the length or breadth of the Fury Road or in the Citadel really grasps the concept.  

Today, though, he’s come back from sixty-one days of wandering, bringing news and newly made maps of other territories, delivered in his halting, truncated way. The girls, Cheedo dancing about like the robin she is, urges him to see what they’ve done with the green and water, Capable directs her boys (Capable Boys they’re called now) to see to his car, one salvaged from the wreck of war parties in the desert. He brings Furiosa guns and bullets, scattered across her desk and on the maps she studies. She fixes him with an unimpressed look. He gives her one of his own in reply, before muttering, “Sorry.” He sweeps them away to sort and match to the guns. 

They spend a few hours in companionable silence like this, her reading reports from scouts and him sorting and cleaning weaponry. Boys and Mothers and the Sisters come in and out, bringing intelligence, news, reports from the People (Wretched no longer, they are the  _People of the Citadel_ now) as Max sits quietly and seems to pay no attention to any of it, though Furiosa knows he is. 

It isn’t meant her for to sit and listen all day, and when the last Boy leaves, she sits back, grimacing, rolling her shoulders to relieve herself of tension that always seems to linger. Dag has what the Mothers call “healer’s hands,” but her touch is too soft and careful for Furiosa and not what works at getting the knots out.

After the third time she tries to rub her shoulder blade with her one flesh hand, Max looks up from his scatter of weaponry, on the alert as ever. He watches her for a moment before rising and coming over, standing before her as silently as ever. She waits it out, as every patient lioness knows how to.

“I can,” he says finally. “Know how, if you want.” And just  _stops_.

Furiosa glances at him, knowing full well how intently he avoids physical contact if he can help it. She is the only person who he seems remotely easy with touching, and she isn’t sure what kind of gift it is. “Under my shoulder,” she says finally, “where the straps are. After a long day–”

“Hurts,” he says, nodding like he knows (and he does). “Same f’r my knee.”

He holds his hands out, careful and waiting. He always waits for her word before he goes to touch her, she doesn’t miss this either. 

She nods once, slowly, and he comes up behind her; they are both acutely aware that the other one is  _letting_ them do this. Max’s hands are warm, calloused and rough, just as any War Boy’s in the Citadel. They are carefully impersonal at first, almost detached, until he hits the sore spot she can  _never_ reach with only one hand and she rumbles low in her throat, half pain, half relief. That seems to switch  _something_ on in his head, because his fingers work through her shoulder blades, neck and the imprint of a long day of wearing leather belts around her torso leave. 

A sound rumbles out of her, something that hasn’t been heard in seven thousand days and all the ones she doesn’t remember, deep and low in her throat, a contented thunderstorm. A  _purr._ Max’s hands keep working steadily until Furiosa feels like a mound of sun warmed clay, and then they slowly stop and settle, the very tips of them, on her shoulders. He hums a question. 

He purrs too, she realizes, the days she can drag lazy fingers through his hair and gently scrape her nails across his scalp (he seems to like that, if the way he arches into it is any indication) and he doesn’t flinch away, a honeyed growl that seems to embarrass him every time he makes it (thirty-one out of the days he is here and counting, she will not lose or forget a single day). He keeps eyeing her as if expecting some kind of comment. She doesn’t care why, or what forms it comes from. All she cares about is  _hearing_ it, more and more often, coaxed out of him by any means that makes it. Cold nights he sleeps with her back to his front, face pressed to the nape of her neck where the brand is, and it thrums in her bones like an engine thrown into gear, feels like warmth from sun-baked stone. 

 _Tiger,_ she thinks, a half-forgotten verse flickering in and out of dreams.  _Tiger, tiger, burning bright._

**Author's Note:**

> taken from the "half-beast prompt on tumblr, "I don’t like it when you pet me because it makes me purr and it’s embarrassing stop it"
> 
> how did this movie about exploding cars and Tom Hardy grunting his way through the desert and handing guns to Charlize Theron take over my life, I didn't even expect to _like_ this movie
> 
>  
> 
> _how_
> 
>  
> 
> Max _is_ part tiger, in case you were wondering. Solitary, roaming creatures who always return to the center of their territory


End file.
